This essay examines the images of the bride constructed by China’s burgeoning
bridal media that sell lavish wedding products and services. Through the lens of
semiotics, the author focuses on analyzing bridal magazines widely circulated in
China’s consumer culture. The analysis shows that China’s evolving wedding industry
adapts the trite, oppressive trope of “romantic” Western wedding rituals
into a bricolage of global fashions, lifestyles, beauty regimens, and marriage tips
for the Chinese bride. Conveniently tapping into the rhetoric of neoliberal consumerist
agency and postfeminism, the wedding industry repackages patriarchal
domination over the bride-to-be in the process of generating profits and disseminating
the ideal of consumer one-upmanship. The author further argues that the
modern Chinese bride, seemingly empowered within the opulent consumption at
her wedding, neither escapes from the gender scripts of Chinese society nor celebrates
a significant enhancement of her status in her marital relationship. In this
regard, the bridal industry normalizes heterosexual matrimony and reinscribes
women’s subordinate position in marriage and love.

Introduction

… a convoy of ten Mercedes-Benz led by a Lincoln limousine
preceded up the Chang’an Avenue in Beijing and stopped before
a grand hotel. Flowers, balloons and small figurines decorated
the motorcade. The newly wed couple stepped out of the
limousine and were quickly surrounded by photographers, video
cameras and a cheering crowd. This is the scene of a genuine
modern day wedding in China (Guo, 2002, China.org.cn).

The above scenario depicted in a journalistic survey magnifies a compelling
phenomenon in China’s socio-cultural landscape since the millennium:
elaborate weddings being in vogue and the seemingly private issues
of love and marriage becoming the showcase of class status. The
so-called “modern day wedding,” a local spectacle created by the country’s
nouveau riche, embodies not only the uprising of China’s wedding
industry, but also the country’s increasing economic power especially after
its political accession to WTO. Against the escalating torrents of globalization,
the impact of Western wedding rituals on the local matrimonial
tradition has caught scholars’ critical attention (Adrian, 2003, 2006;
Gillette, 2000; Goldstein-Gidoni, 1997; Otnes & Pleck, 2003). As early
as the 1990s, Adrian’s (2003) ethnographic study of the Taiwanese bridal
industry points to the local culture’s starting trend of emulating Western
feminine images disseminated via mass media. Adrian (2006) also notes
that in the mid-1990s Taiwanese investors were opening beauty salons
in mainland China and that gowns considered outdated and tattered in
Taiwan were shipped to the mainland and reused among the “less discriminating”
mainlanders (p. 78). Interestingly, the postmillennial consumer
culture has witnessed the upper-middle class mainlanders ascending
the rungs of the international fashion hierarchy. According to a most
recent BBC news report, China’s wedding industry in its totality is worth
over 80 billion USD, with the cost of weddings showing no sign of decrease
as a result of the growing middle-class (Pressly, 2011). Like the
Taiwanese bride, the mainland bride hitherto partakes in the role of an
avid consumer of what Otnes and Pleck (2003) call “lavish weddings,”
which used to mark the privilege of the Euro-American bride.

Indeed, the modern Chinese bride1, turning into a divisive class symbol, seems empowered within the opulent Wedding consumption.
Adorned with a brand-name tight-bodiced gown, lacey veil, stiletto, tiara,
and cosmetics, the modern bride presents a sharp contrast to her counterparts
of previous generations. In Chinese historicity, Chinese women
were victims of patriarchal families, and arranged marriage and polygamy
systems. As Zhang Yimou’s (1991) well-acclaimed blockbuster Raise the
Red Lantern depicts, the feudal wife herself tokened blatant gender oppression
in the not so distant memories of the pre-communist arranged
marriage and polygamy systems. Zhang’s (1991) masterpiece vividly
magnifies the atrocious victimization of the concubines who competed
for their master’s gaze, symbolized by the bizarre ritual of lighting the
red lanterns at the door of the favored wife. Historians also note that
in the social realities of China’s feudal past, the bride remained voiceless,
as if blindly following the fate of her arranged matrimony (Croll,
1980; Watson & Ebrey, 1991). The exchanges of properties between the
families in the form of betrothal gifts from the groom’s family, and of
dowry from the bride’s family implied that the bride was part of the
property being transferred in the wedding ceremony (Watson & Ebrey,
1991). The traditional wedding costume consisted of a veil made of opaque
fabrics. The veil, intended to make the bride appear shy and feminine,
disguised and blinded her from the moment she departed from
her parents’ household until the moment of the wedding ceremony’s
completion when she was passively carried by the groom to their new
bedroom. The bride of the feudal past was the unseeing player of the
wedding, who had no control over her own rite of passage of transforming
from a single woman into an immobilized bride and finally into
a wife, encumbered with familial responsibilities and filial piety.

With the practice of betrothal gifts and dowry exchanges decreasing
in the postsocialist era, the contemporary bride seemingly dominates
her wedding ceremony, indulged in her self-centered consumption of
the wedding industry, usually in the form of a globalizing “one-stop
center,” which provides packaged wedding services ranging from making
up and dressing up the bride, photographing, and arranging bouquets
to catering just about everything else relevant to the celebration
(D. Chen, 2003).

Such a luxurious wedding practice presents a stark contrast to that
of the Mao era, during which the rituals of frugality ceremonies in the
city hall prevailed. Couples were commonly declared married by a
Communist Party member, say, a leader from the husband’s or the
wife’s workplace. A spartan reception followed the unassuming ceremony
where tea and homemade food was served. As anthropologist
Constable (2006) recalls, the Cultural Revolution portraits of brides, for
instance, showed “women in the same poses, clothing, and with the
same expressions as men, but sometimes as smaller in size” whereas the
modern bridal images underscored women’s gender identity especially
via conspicuous consumption of feminine products (p. 50). The dramatically
changed outlook of the modern bride against China’s vast historical
backdrop triggers this particular study. This author argues that the material
abundance accessible to the bride in the discourse of consumerism
does not translate into the demise of patriarchal and hegemonic control
over the bride. Scholarly discussions have shed light on the ways contemporary
bridal industry, asserting its strong institutional power, commercializes
weddings and disseminates hegemonic messages about gender
roles, and heterosexual love, and marriage. The romanticized images
of the Western bride, dressed up, made up, and coiffed for the supposedly
most important day of her life, have received much criticism, as
such images symbolize gender oppression on the beautified female body
in the name of her rite of passage (Adrian, 2003; Engstorm, 2003, 2008;
Engstorm & Semic, 2003; Levine, 2005; Otnes & Pleck, 2003).
Borrowing from the existing studies, this paper examines the images of
the bride constructed within China’s burgeoning wedding industry that
sells lavish wedding products and services. More specifically, the author
focuses on analyzing both the print issues and Web pages of the bridal
magazines widely circulated in China’s consumer culture.

Whereas much research focuses on the bridal industry in the West
and the ways it becomes a purveyor of hegemonic control, this study
is centered on an analysis on the spread of consumerist ideologies in
mainland China against the sweeping tide of globalization. This author
is particularly concerned about the process of the global joining the local
in producing new, oppressive gendered meanings that are leaving
indelible marks on local women and their identity formation (see
Evans, 2006). The popular texts of China’s bridal media constitute a
microcosmic yet revealing case to elucidate how the blending of global
and local forces reinscribes the local woman’s subordinate position in
marriage and love. While current studies find the local emulating
Western wedding rituals as a result of imbalanced transnational flows
of cultural capital (Adrian, 2003, 2006; Otnes & Pleck, 2003), these
studies have not yet identified the local industry’s nuanced adaptations
of the tropes of Western weddings and the extent to which such adaptations
construct the imagery of the Chinese bride. The burgeoning
Chinese wedding industry points to a rich site wherein the hegemonic
global forces join the local systems in fomenting new gendered meanings
and gender politics. In other words, the lavish wedding, along
with the imported Western rituals, conveys much more than
“sophistication, luxury, and status” in Chinese culture (Otnes & Pleck,
2003, p. 199). Rather, the extravaganza of the wedding itself deflects
the evolving regulatory mechanism of gender toward the consumerist
agency of the Chinese bride.

The following analysis shows that China’s evolving wedding industry
adapts the trite, oppressive trope of “romantic” Western wedding rituals
into a bricolage of global fashions, lifestyles, beauty regimens, and marriage
tips for the Chinese bride. Conveniently tapping into the rhetoric
of consumerist agency and postfeminism, the wedding industry re-packages
patriarchal domination over the bride in the process of generating
profits and disseminating the ideal of consumer one-upmanship. It is
further argued that the modern Chinese bride, seemingly empowered
within her hedonistic wedding consumption, neither escapes from the
gender scripts of Chinese society nor celebrates a significant enhancement
of her status in her marital relationship. In particular, the bridal
media normalizes heterosexual matrimony and reinscribes women’s subordinate
position in marriage and love.

Consumerist Agency, Postfeminist Mentality, and the Rise
of Wedding Industry

The dramatic changes of China’s wedding rituals jibe with the rapid
growth of the wedding industry, an in-depth understanding of which
needs to be contextualized within a welter of consumerist and gender
discourses. In the early 1980s, the post-Mao open-door policy marked
not only the inception of the watershed economic reform, but also the
spread of Euro-American-led neoliberalism (E. Chen, 2012). Notably,
the meanings of “neoliberalism” in the Chinese contexts have departed
from Alexander Rüstow’s original conceptualization of the term, which
is defined as “the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise,
the system of competition and a strong and impartial state” (Mirowski
& Plehwe, 2009, pp. 13-14). As shown in the governmental report titled
“China’s Progress toward the Millennium Development Goal”
(Anonymous, 2008), China’s economy reform, in its developmental
phases, manifests the central government’s strong regulating role toward
the common goal of achieving “Xiao Kang” (translated as “moderately
prosperous society”). In the process of opening up to the outside world,
the Chinese state exerts constant control over the time and space for
the inflow and outflow of transnational capitals and resources. However,
the neoliberal values of state deregulation, marketization, and privatization
have become pervasive in sections of the marketplace, which pose
the least threat to the state dominance, the wedding industry being a
case in point. Initiated from Deng Xiaoping’s notorious slogan “Getting
Rich is Glorious,” the market economy eventually led to what Davis
(2000) terms as a “consumer revolution,” during which the central state,
state-owned enterprises, privatized industries, and joint ventures partake
in the important role of fusing the local and global forces.

The rhetoric of consumer choice and agency, as a significant part
of capitalist values, pervades Chinese everyday life. Such rhetoric, as
Yang (2011) and Chen (2012) concur, resonates with Foucault’s (2008)
discussions of “biopolitics,” a form of self-initiative governance that
commands active choice and self-responsibility of the individualized
consumer. Both scholars observe that the advocacy of consumerist
agency has seeped into China’s gender politics and left deep imprints
on the corporeality of the female body and femininity as well as on the
modern woman’s consumer lifestyle (E. Chen, 2012; Yang, 2011). Yang
(2011) is quick to note that the modern Chinese woman is constantly
tempted to consume beautification products and services such as cosmetics
and cosmetic surgery apropos of appearing younger and thus
presumably more sexually attractive. Indeed, the self-disciplined woman
consumer showcases her enhanced purchasing power and contributes
tremendously to the prosperity of a beauty economy, a term that broadly
refers to the utilization of feminine beauty for such profit-driven socio-economic activities as selling fashion, cosmetics, and beautification
procedures, to name a few (X. Zhou, 2004; Xu & Feiner, 2007; Yang,
2011). However, the same economically empowered woman lacks the
critical consciousness to detect the convoluted mechanism of gender oppression
so quietly aligned with the neoliberal values.

In the representational terrain, Chen (2012) finds that the market logic
exerts its influence on both local and global media’s construction of
heroines who appear to “have it all”: beauty, sexual attractiveness, and
financial independence. Chen’s (2012) analysis of Shanghai Baby, a novel
representative of China’s popular yet controversial chic lit, points to the
ostensible resemblance between the fashion-conscious, pleasure-seeking,
and sexually confident Shanghai women and their American counterparts
in Sex and The City, a contentious six-year run HBO drama series
that has gone global since its debut in 1998. Like Carrie’s social circle,
Chinese Coco and her female friends seem to enjoy financial security
and consumer freedom over upscale commodities, world fashion, and
even men. However, these female protagonists in both the American
and Chinese versions fail to transcend the constraints of patriarchy entrenched
in their cultures. After all, their display of self-control is contained
within the consumption arena. Despite their career success, cosmopolitan
sophistication, and cultural competence, these modern women
longingly subject themselves to the male power and the institution
of heterosexual love and marriage. Chic lit is not the sole media genre
that mirrors the façade of female empowerment in China’s consumerist
discourse. The year 2010 witnessed the popularity of reality dating
shows on Chinese television. The show with the highest profile Fei
Cheng Wu Rao (If You Are the One) aired on Jiangsu Satellite Television
Channel recruits, for each episode, 24 women (aged between early 20s
and mid 30s) as participants to search for a date, boyfriend, or even
husband among five bachelors who become the final players only after
undergoing scrutinizing interviews with the show’s production
committee. The show has captivated millions of TV viewers at home
and abroad, as they are intrigued by the social drama playing live on
the stage, where the young women wield their “power” of questioning,
challenging, and switching on and off their stage lights to determine the
success or failure of each individual male player. The women on the
stage, hailing from various parts of the country, share the conspicuous
commonalities of youth, beauty, career success (mostly yuppies), and upper-middle class status. These women’s momentary power over each
man finally gives way to the decisive domination of the male “survivor”
who gets to pick his favorite date among the team of beautiful nouveaux
riches so eager to marry themselves off.

The images of the women consumers with romance-saturated and materialistic
lifestyle, both fictional and real, speak to the pervasive power
of globalizing consumerist ideologies that create a façade of female empowerment
in the local contexts. This author posits that the illusory freedom
that modern Chinese women enjoy manifests the postfemininist
mentality that is interwoven with consumerist values. Conceptualized
within Western feminist scholarship, the loaded label of “postfeminism”
implies a strategic divorce from the second-wave feminist movement,
based upon the postulation that the political goal of women’s advancement
has been achieved as their material needs are met (Vavrus, 1998).
Sex and the City’s heroines Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha iconize
postfeminist women in the West. In the Chinese contexts, the postfeminist
mentality aligns well with the rhetoric of the post-Mao importation
of capitalist market economy. The postfeminist icons in the
chic lit Shanghai Baby and the reality TV show Fei Cheng Wu Rao seem
to attest to the achievement of Mao’s feminist ambition for women
“holding half of the sky” (Barret, 1973, p. 193). Then, the postfeminist
sentiment misleadingly suggests that the current generation of women,
the grownups of the one-child families, can veer away from the long-past
political agendas of their mothers and grandmothers. In this regard, the
postfemininst mentality conveniently justifies modern women’s indulgence
in China’s burgeoning consumer culture but also legitimizes
gendered consumption of woman-centered products and services-- wedding
packages as a case in point. As feminist scholars have eloquently
argued, postfeminism, as a supposedly liberating label, is tainted with the
ideological turpitude of concealing gender inequality (Arthurs, 2003;
Goldman, Heath, & Smith, 1991; Hains, 2009; Stillion-Southard, 2008;
Luo, 2012a; Vavrus, 2000). Indeed, the seemingly empowered postfeminist
female subject indexes a trivialization of women’s political lives
and a truncated development of their collective critical consciousness on
the one hand. On the other hand, the same female subject, with her
consumerist agency, symbolizes a divisive social force, as she is supposed
to represent the privileged, the educated, the upper-middle class, and the
“haves” in the consumer culture (Luo, 2012a).

The postfeminist mentality, along with the rhetoric of consumerist
agency, becomes the hotbed wherein oppressive gender politics spawn.
Against the historical forces of the economy reform and the socio-cultural
backdrop of globalizing consumerism, China’s wedding industry has
bourgeoned into a multibillion USD conglomerate, pandering to the newly
acquired expectations of women of the “1980s generation,” (the
so-called “ba ling hou”) who, having grown up in the era of reform and
globalization, are about to tie the knot. Research on Western weddings
indicates that wedding enterprises expand via a synergistic blending with
a plethora of industries, especially media conglomerates (Engstrom, 2008;
Levine, 2005). Unsurprisingly, the Chinese wedding industry models itself
after the globalizing trend. When Adrian (2003) first visited Taiwan to
study the local bridal culture in the mid-1990s, she observed that beauty
salons and photographic studios undertook the main tasks of styling the
Taiwanese brides. Interestingly, Adrian (2003) also found that Taiwanese
entrepreneurs were starting to explore the marketplace of mainland
China, although the early reform era saw women mainlanders standing
on the low rung of the world fashion hierarchy, yet to develop their
aesthetic sensibilities. Along with the accelerating influx of global capitals,
the new millennium has witnessed the small-scale aesthetic salons in
mainland cities giving way to sprawling wedding corporations, which are
establishing symbiotic relationships with photographing, jewelry, fashion,
media, advertising, and tourist industries at home and abroad. A liaison
between the local and global, annual wedding expos at regional, national,
and international levels constitute an essential part of profit-generating
mechanism upon which this particular industry is based. As a 2009 China
Daily report perceives, even the global financial crisis failed to deter millions
of Chinese newlyweds from splurging on packaged wedding services
and products at the year’s Beijing Wedding Expo (X. R. Chen, 2009).
An average couple is reported as spending 18,500 USD on a wedding,
which is estimated to be 20 times their average monthly salary (X. R.
Chen, 2009). The same journalistic report points to the flourishing of
joint-venture enterprises. Local photography studios join hands with
those in Europe and North America. The Professional Photographers of
America (PPA), for instance, has opened its office to train local wedding
photographers. The honeymoon, another big fat expenditure, has acquired certain local traits in the sense that professional photographers
accompany the couple along their trip to shoot bridal portraits at the
memorable spots of exotic locales (X. R. Chen, 2009). Given that the
2009 Wedding Expo gives a glimpse of the industry at the time of global
economic downturn, the 2012 Expo in Beijing reports that 10 million
couples tie the knot annually, thus generating a total of 63 billion USD
from across the country (Women of China, 2012). Such statistics herald
China’s vastly increased marketplace, expanding as if it knew no bounds,
as well as the country’s wedding synergism that is ascending to the pinnacle
of its kinds across the globe.

In sum, the intertwining neoliberal values of consumerist agency and
the mentality of postfemism promote the rapid growth of the wedding
industry in mainland China, which naturalizes its establishment as a
bride-centered conglomerate, not only openly sharing the country’s consumer
cornucopia, but also implicitly regimenting women’s bodies and
their positions in marriage and love.

Through the Lens of Semiotics

Since it is not feasible to examine the industry in its totality, this research
focuses on analyzing the bridal magazines widely circulated in
China’s consumer culture. More specifically, selected print issues
(published from January, 2011 until June, 2012) and Web pages2 of Zexy
(Da Zhong Jie Xi), Modern Brides (Xin Niang), Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin
Niang), and Goinlove.com (Shi Shang Hun Qing Wang) are used as the corpus
of the textual examination. As these magazines (except for
Goinlove.com, which is a wedding consultation Web site) are all monthly
periodicals with an average of 200 pages in each print issue, this author
read through more than 10,000 pages of magazine texts.

The analysis of the bridal magazine texts was approached through the
methodological framework of semiotics. The value of semiotics for this
study is its ability to place a text within a larger system of cultural
representations. From this perspective, it is not the text itself as much
as it is the decoded meaning of that text that is important to
understand. Barthes (1972) believes that meanings can be analyzed,
based upon two orders of signification. The first level refers to denotation,
a surface understanding that describes the “direct, specific meaning
we get from a sign” (Berger, 1989, p. 48). This level constitutes the simple,
basic, descriptive level of a sign, where “consensus is wide and
most people would agree on the meaning” (Hall, 1997, p. 38). The second
level consists of connotation, usually in the form of myths and
symbols, which go beyond the surface understanding of the denotative
level. Connotation involves an interpretation of contexts, such as the
surrounding culture and symbolism. The signifiers that have been decoded
at the denotative level through the use of “conventional classifications”
enter wider and more sophisticated codes, which “link them
with what we may call the wider semantic fields of our culture” (Hall,
1997, p. 38). Meanings at this level are no longer at a descriptive level
of common and obvious interpretations. Instead, interpretations are connected
to wider realms of social ideologies. Ultimately, connotative
meanings of signs turn into, reflect, and/or reinforce, ideological myths
(Berger, 1989). Barthes3 (1972) explains:

The text is indeed the creator’s (and hence society’s) right of
inspection over the image; anchorage is control, bearing a
responsibility –in the face of the projective power of pictures–for the use of the message. With respect to the liberty of the
signifieds of the image, the text has thus a repressive value and
we can see that it is at this level that the morality and ideology
of a society are above all invested. (p. 40)

The author finds Barthes’ s semiotic framework a useful guide to the
analysis of the verbal and visual texts of the bridal magazines in that
this framework allows for reading between the lines, identifying both denotative
and connotative meanings of texts, and thus delving into the
ideologies the texts convey, construct and/or reinforce. In this analysis,
the discursive and fragmentary of portrayals of the Chinese bride and
her wedding consumption constitute a microcosm of conflating consumerist
and gender discourses. Special attention is paid to not only the
ideological underpinnings the media texts convey, but also the power relationships
that these texts negotiate and buttress. The analysis serves
two purposes: 1) to understand how the globalizing practices of lavish
weddings are being repackaged and sold to the local women consumers;
and 2) to interrogate how the globalizing forces join hands with the local
industry to recreate new forms of oppressive gender politics under
the banner of consumer one-upmanship.

The Bridal Magazines: Constructing the Modern Chinese Bride

Apparently, a significant player within the wedding synergism is the
media. Bridal magazines develop both print and online versions, creating
a dazzling array of wedding artifacts, images, and representations for the
modern Chinese bride, who is glorified in all her finery within the full
bloom of the industry. Zexy (Da Zhong Jie Xi), Modern Brides (Xin Niang),
Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang), and Goinlove.com (Shi Shang Hun Qing
Wang), stand out as the mainstay of the Chinese bridal publications,
reaching multitudinous readers who can subscribe the print issues or surf
the Web pages. Interestingly, the unit prices of the magazines’ print editions
are very low, ranging from merely 1.6 USD to 4 USD per issue.
Furthermore, with a total monthly circulation of over one million print
copies, these publications seem affordable to even low income readers.
However, sample readings of these magazines’ mission statements indicate that their major target readers are the educated upper-middle class,
especially those who have ascended China’s new social hierarchy. For example,
sm114.com.cn, one of the popular search engines of media, publicizes
the current reader profile of Modern Brides (Xin Niang), which says
that 92% of its readers are college graduates and that 69% of the reader
population earn a monthly income of above 565 USD (3500 RMB).

These different magazines, all with their inceptions in the new millennium,
share the commonality of establishing a complex web of symbiotic
relationships with both local and global enterprises. Whereas Zexy
(Da Zhong Jie Xi) cooperates with the Japanese Zexy publications, mutually
sharing resources, Modern Brides (Xin Niang) indicates in every
monthly issue that the Chinese magazine has established copyright alliance
with America’s Advanced Magazine Publishers, Inc, whose registered
trademarks include Moden Brides, Brides, and Elegant Bride. By contrast,
both Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang), and Goinlove.com (Shi Shang
Hun Qing Wan) focus on domestic networking, yet drawing heavily from
resources about foreign wedding rituals, world fashion designs, and international
brand-name commodities and services. The characteristics of
media synergism are most distinctly manifested in Goinlove.com, a comprehensive
wedding Web site that provides hyperlinks to wedding
events, products, and services in a total of 47 major cities across mainland
China. Albeit having different ownerships and joint ventures, these
bridal magazines, in tandem with their Web pages, configure a kaleidoscopic
collection on weddings, marriages, brides, and fashion. The chromatic
magazine/Web pages, replete with photographs of shining jewelry,
blooming floras, flashy fashion designs, and picturesque tourist spots,
serve the function of “guiding” the modern bride through the rite of
her wedding, from selecting the gown, purchasing the package consisting
of professional photographers, planners, emcees, and coordinators,
to deciding the honeymoon locale. However, a close semiotic reading
reveals that these magazines go beyond what they claim, in their mission
statements, to be consumer guides, and become identifiable power holders
adapting global forces to the Chinese context and fomenting oppressive
yet discursive gender discourses. More specifically, they assert
their hegemonic role of normalizing the lavish wedding, constructing the
“ideal” bride, and regimenting gender roles in marriage and love.
Ironically, upper-middle class professional women join their male counterparts to serve on the editorial committees of these magazines. For instance,
both Modern Brides (Xin Niang) and Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang)
have hired women editorial directors4. Most noticeably, a team of fashion,
copyright, and art women editors works for Modern Brides (Xin
Niang). These women problematically take an active part in molding and
perpetuating the oppressive gender regime of the media.

In the analysis, this author begins from the notion of “packaging” and
further looks into the ways the magazine texts－a microcosm of China’s
wedding industry－repackage the trite, oppressive trope of “romantic”
Western weddings into a bricolage of global fashions, lifestyles, beauty
regimens, and marriage tips for the Chinese bride. The author borrows
from anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1974) the concept of “bricolage,”
which refers to the act of (re)creating improvised structures/objects via
an appropriation of pre-existing materials ready to hand. In Lévi-
Strauss’s (1974) initial conception, a bricoleur, one who engages in bricolage,
is “someone who works with his [her] hands and uses devious
means compared to those of a craftsman” (pp. 16-17). In other words,
the performance of bricolage conveys the bricoleur’s subjectivity and
agency in the process of creating his/her own signification of meanings.
In the Chinese case, this author posits that the local wedding industry
undertakes the task of a bricoleur. However, its bricolage, pandering to
women’s consumerist agency, masks new forms of oppressive gender
and social scripts.

Packaged Weddings for Sale

In her study of Japanese weddings, Goldstein-Gidoin (1997) uses the
metaphor of “packaging” to depict the bride’s passive and objectified
role in the wedding:

In the process of being packaged in her traditional-Japanese and
Western packages, the modern Japanese bride is objectified by
the packagers and moreover, collaborates in the objectification.
Aiming to fulfill her “Cinderella Dream,” she collaborates as a
customer of both the wedding industry and of the products
advertised for brides, and also as a woman who “puts in
evidence her masters’ ability to pay” (p. 134)

Interestingly, in the Chinese bridal publications examined, “packaging”
seems the portal to each successful wedding. In Zexy magazine, for example,
packaging literally refers to wedding formulas sold as a whole,
which include six key elements: the wedding venue, the jewelry, the
photographing, the costumes, the wedding design, and miscellaneous
items (such as candies and party favors). Each element itself consists of
layers of smaller packages. For instance, the wedding design consists of
stage decorations, lighting, acoustic setting, videotaping, emcees, and bridal
stylists. Zexy strategically blurs the line between providing wedding
tips and advertising the wedding packages via presenting exemplars of
“wedding stories” in each monthly issue. Take the January 2012 issue
of Zexy for example, which depicts two contrasting wedding stories,
both of which took place in Shanghai in 2011. Bride Yu’s wedding
adopts the theme of “Blooming,” characterized by colorful, delicate paper
bouquets, whereas bride Jin selects white and champagne colors for
her stage to highlight the ambiance of the “Pure Love” theme. The
magazine discusses the two weddings in the same format, listing their
detailed schedules for each step of the ceremonies as well as the performance
contents at their banquets. With a brief account about the two
couples’ love stories, accompanied by visual texts to presumably capture
their happiest moments, the Zexy article comments on the characteristic
designs of each package respectively and provides a summary table, indicating
the expenditure of each procedure. Jin’s wedding costs a total
of 1,104,225 RMB5 (177, 243 USD), with the planning and designing
service expenditure amounting to a quarter of a million RMB. Moreover,
Jin splurges on her wedding venue at the Waldorf Astoria, an upscale
hotel owned by Hilton so that her ceremony is immersed in a “classical
ambience of Western uniqueness,” as Zexy describes (Zexy, January
2012, p. 15). No doubt Jin’s bridal photographing costs much more
than the average studios would charge as all the photos are taken in
Sydney, Australia in a special tour accompanied by a professional wedding
photographer and his team of assistants. By contrast, Yu’s wedding
expenditure totals 226,660 RMB (36,382 USD), which also indexes a
lavish wedding, albeit much less pricey than Jin’s package. Yu holds an
extravagant banquet that entertains 19 round tables of guests, which
alone costs 120,000 RMB (19,261 USD), but she is willing to spend less
on her bridal photographing via hiring a Korean studio without undertaking
an oversea tour.

These two wedding exemplars are representative of what the Chinese
bridal magazines promote as “ideal” wedding packages. The 24 wedding
cases reported in Zexy magazine (between the January 2011 issue and
the January 2012 issue) range in price approximately from 200,000 RMB
(32,102 USD) to 1,000,000 RMB (160,513 USD). In comparison to
Goldstein-Gidoin’s (1997) discussions of the “packaging” of the
Japanese bride, the notion of “packaging” in the Chinese contexts is
embedded within even more complex ideological underpinnings. As Yu’s
and Jin’s wedding experiences indicate, packaging, above all, entails various
layers of commercialization that conspicuously attaches to a high
price tag, signifying social and consumerist hierarchy. Furthermore,
packaging entails a normalizing process that renders lavish wedding
practices an unquestioned part of the expected social scripts and cultural
performance. Like the Japanese bride, the Chinese bride in the magazines’
depictions is objectified at the “one-stop” center (also see,
Engstrom, 2008), where the “packagers” (such as photographers, stylists,
wedding planners, fashion designers, jewelers, and coordinators) painstakingly
prepare her for the requisite glamour of a lavishing wedding
performance. However, the Chinese bride’s objectification within the
process of packaging is covered up by the consumer ambitions and the
active social and gender roles she is expected to perform.

The reading of the bridal texts further reveals that a wedding package
entails not only an array of luxurious commodities and services, but also
a blending of ideas about love and marriage, all of which have the imprints
of the globalizing forces. Implicitly, the Western notion of
“romantic love” is being repackaged by the local industry, through a sophisticated
appropriation or even transformation, into a bricolage of
supposedly new, multicultural experiences and lifestyles for the Chinese
bride. Again, the highlighting of the woman’s consumer agency deflects
her conformity to the evolving gender scripts toward an illusory
empowerment.

A Bricolage of “Romance”

In her analysis of Taiwanese bridal photographing, Adrian (2003) observes
that the bridal portraits of her research informants share the
common theme of “romance,” a supposedly Western ideal that has conveniently
become a catchphrase in the globalizing wedding industry.
However, rather than actually experiencing romance, the Taiwanese couple
perform romance within a few seconds under the flashing of the
camera. Comparably in this present analysis, the plethora of bridal photos
in the print magazines and their Web pages provide evidence that the
Chinese bride is charged with the similar tasks of staging romantic love
through her hairstyles, gowns, jewelry, and photographic backgrounds.
She is captured with facial expressions that present her as innocent, shy,
bold, flirtatious or coquettish, as if she were following a fixed acting
script notwithstanding the changing backgrounds, say, of a Shanghai
coffee shop, an exotic Vietnamese fresh marketplace, or an elegant
Barcelonan Catholic church6. Such portraits bespeak “commodified romance,”
which, as Boden (2003) argues, can be easily achieved through
materialistic consumption in contrast to marriage itself that tends to be
challenging to maneuver in reality because of its “indefinable lifespan,
its unpredictable scripts, and its unknown emotional journeys” (p. 122).
To extend Boden’s argument, the momentary romance as part of the
lavish wedding rituals does not attest to a woman’s actual position in
her matrimony.

While the visual texts of the magazines depict the staged romance in
its simplicity, the verbal texts expand the notion of “romance” into
more sophisticated sensibilities of modernity. Romance in Western fantasy
entails the trite tropes of Euro-American fairy-tales, say, Cinderella
and Prince Charming living happily-ever-after, which fuel Western
brides’ dreams of being a princess in a lavish wedding (Otnes & Pleck,
2003). In the Chinese case, the imagery of Cinderella bears little resemblance
to the country’s distant memories of princesses and princes in
the feudal dynasties and therefore might not appeal as much to the
Chinese woman consumer. Romance, in the local wedding consumer
market, is repackaged for sale, which the author finds has the following
manifestations in the bridal magazines.

First, the notion of romance is vaguely translated into an ingenious
blending of Western (or foreign) and Chinese wedding practices. For instance,
Today Brides (April 2012) depicts the wedding of Shou Kan (the
groom) and Wei Yi (the bride) as imbued with “romantic love.” The
couple from Hangzhou are said to have fallen in love at the first sight.
Shou realizes that Wei is the woman he has been awaiting his whole
life. He takes her to the seaside on a moonlit, starry night, kneels in
front of her, and gives her the ring. With the help of a posse of wedding
professionals, they hold their wedding ceremony at a Western coffee
shop named “Soft Time” owned by the bride, which, as the narrative
goes, is harmoniously integrated into Chinese elements such as the
use of crimson silk and paper parasols as decorations. The bride wears
the bright red Cheongsam and follows the local tradition of wrapping
herself in a red comforter－a gesture of good luck－before leaving for
her ceremony. As the camera shows, in her Cheongsam, the bride also
serves tea and bows to her parents-in-law, adhering to another local
tradition. She then changes into a milky Western-style wedding gown for
the actual ceremony in which the couple takes wedding vows, surrounded
by floating soap bubbles and under the deep red parasols hanging
from the ceiling of the coffee shop. The magazine article valorizes
the couple’s ingenious selections of wedding locale, theme, and colors,
all of which symbolize their marriage as “matching and inseparable as
coffee and milk” (Today Brides, April 2012, pp. 88-89). In this example,
the magazine turns a cliché Western- style wedding proposal into an innovative
Chinese wedding, a process that oozes romantic sentiments for
emulation and for sale.

Second, the experience of romance is mingled with the new experience
of the so-called “individualized,” “customized,” or “DIY” wedding
package, which the bridal industry sells in particular. In an article titled
“The Individualized Package: Creating the For-You-Only Wedding,”
Modern Brides (June 2012) advocates that the new generations born in the
1980s and the 1990s follow the vogue of customizing and individualizing
their weddings. To avoid a lackluster, homogenous wedding, the article
presents a team of wedding experts’ professional suggestions on
how to plan a unique, and romantic wedding through “individualized
photographing,” “theme-based ceremony,” “customized flora arrangement,”
and “personalized invitation card design” (Modern Brides, June
2012, pp. 48-53). The thus-labeled “individualized photographing” refers,
according to the Chinese photographer in the article, to a photo-
shooting process that resembles a movie-shooting routine. With detailed
acting scripts, each shoot is treated as the making of a special
scene in a movie. Each pose is designed based upon the couple’s characters
rather than merely their looks. The portraits are to capture and
frame their happiness. As for a “theme-based” ceremony, the experts
advocate drawing inspirations from the couple’s personal growth, love
stories, and idiosyncratic hobbies. An environment-conscious bride, for
example, can highlight both her romantic love and her love for the environment
via using recyclable materials and green plants as her major
ambience decorations. “DIY” stands out as another buzzword in the individualized,
fashionable, and expensive wedding package. It turns out
that “DIY” loses its actual meanings of “Do It Yourself” in the local
contexts because the couple is only encouraged to do the minimum
such as selecting the colors and designs of their invitation cards. As
this magazine article reflects, the notion of romance is ingeniously integrated
into imbrications of other imported catchphrases, which seem
irresistible to the local bride, who indulges in the opulent consumption
of Vera Wang wedding gowns, Tiffany jewelry, Roger Vivier stilettos,
Barcelonan photo shooting, as well as the globalizing ideals of
theme-based, individualized, and even DIY wedding designs. Of course,
romantic love and the staging of it all come with a high price that can
fortify the social hierarchy of the bride and the family she marries into.

Finally, the sentiment of romance is conveyed in the romance-saturated commercials that are an integral part of these bridal magazines.
Every monthly issue of Modern Brides, for instance, entails a series of
elaborate advertisements that sell a variety of domestic and foreign
brand jewelry including earrings, bracelets, rings, necklaces, and pendants
by Chaumet Le Grand, Moneta, Tiffany & Co Garden, and Bulgari to
name but a few. These ads portray a jewelry- adorned bride as if in the
epiphany of her femininity: she has delicate, porcelain facial skin, with
any signs of flaws masked by refined layers of cosmetics; she has symmetrically
trimmed and painted eyebrows and shining eyes to communicate
her romantic feelings; she has rosy, moist lips; she smiles to subtly
convey her happiness; and her whole image radiates feminine beauty,
with her gown, veil, and hairstyle a perfect match for every piece of
jewelry she wears. While such visual portrayals only vaguely connote the
woman’s femininity, the narratives create scenarios that metaphorically
link the feminine role with the performance of romance. Below are the
author’s translations of two symptomatic scenarios these ads conjure up:

1) A Story of the Dragonfly

Do you remember the girl who loved to laugh? In the summer evenings,
she sat in a flowery field, counting dragonflies. She wished she
could have a pair of wings, flying as freely as the dragonflies…Since
then, the boy has been dreaming about that field full of flowers… Years
later, the bride smiles as the girl who counted dragonflies puts on the
boy’s gift: a piece of necklace with a dragonfly-shaped pendant, with the
special name of “Dragonfly Above The Flowery Field.”

Rose fell in love with rose flowers at 16. At that age, she felt that
the fragrance of roses suggested love. At 20, she bought only roses. At
that age, she felt that only red color roses could express her passion.
At 22, she received her first bouquet of roses. At 25, she was hurt by
the thorn of roses. It was the first time that she disliked roses. At 28,
her wedding is filled with roses. Rose is her name and her love.

Such poetic, creative, and, again, romance-saturated narratives metaphorically
depict both the bride and the jewelry that decorates her. In
these accounts, the empty signifiers of “romantic love” have been refilled
with new meanings: from fortuitous yet fateful encounters, mutual
attractions, to faithful commitments, all as if dependent upon the abundance
of the burgeoning consumer culture. The commercial depictions
of the lovesick bride indicates that both social and gender roles of the
woman consumer ironically undergo a fixation against the backdrop of
her consumer freedom.

The “Nen” Bride and Her Beauty Regimens

In her study of gender and body politics in postmillennial China,
Yang (2011) notes that nennü and shunü, the two conflating gendered
representations, become the powerful drive of China’s beauty economy,
which thrives on the expediting consumption of cosmetics, fashion,
beautification, and health care products and services at the local consumer
culture. As Yang (2011) explains, nennü is translated into the literal
meaning of “tender, younger women with feminine youth” in contrast
to shunü that indexes “ripe, older women with feminine maturity” (p.
334). As “nen” and “shu” in Chinese language literally refer to the varying
degrees of maturity of fruits, argues Yang (2011), these particular expressions,
when used to depict women, metaphorically connote the presence
of a “tasting male subject” who enjoys an oppressive discourse of
female “exoticism and sexuality” (p. 335). Yang’s (2011) research also
reveals the self-disciplining effects of these two expressions on women
consumers themselves. Indeed, the prosperity of such trades as cosmetics,
beauty salon services, and cosmetic surgery suggests the telltale
anxiety of “ripe women” (shunü) to engage in beautification regimens so
as to have the physiques and demeanors of “tender women” (nennü).
In this regard, the discourses surrounding nennü and shunü, so quietly entering
the everyday expressions of the consumer marketplace, grant a
glimpse of the intertwining gender and body politics that implicitly reinforce male dominance in postsocialist China.

The bridal magazines, as part of the major purveyors of consumerist
values and gender ideologies, disseminate the nennü and shunü messages
in the name of beautifying the bride for a “perfect” wedding. In an article
entitled “‘Nen’ Brides: 2012 Age Reduction Strategies for Brides,”
Zexy magazine blatantly advocates:

Women forever wish they could be 10 years younger. For
those brides-to-be, whatever [bridal] styles they would prefer,
they most likely expect to be made-up as “nen.” Our article
therefore reveals the secret weapon for “age reduction” for
brides through their makeup, hairdos, and wedding gowns so
that even shu brides could be as nen as possible. (Zexy, January
2012, p. 43)

Then, both the visual and verbal texts painstakingly teach a series of
rigid beauty regimens that a bride is supposed to undergo to appear
young and tender-- the thus labeled “nenü.” All these regimens produce
the “ideal” Chinese bride who looks homogeneous to her counterparts.
As the magazine article depicts, the nen bride needs the requisite beautification
routines, for example: 1) the use of pink foundation to make
her face appear as gentle and refreshing as cherry blossoms; 2) the application
of peach color lip gloss to make her lips full and juicy; 3) the
specialization of eye and eyebrow treatments to render her whole face
radiating like a blooming flower; 4) the maintenance of a cascade of
long, curled hair decorated with pink flowers to highlight her rosy
cheeks; and 5) the selection of hairpins, tiaras, or butterfly hair bands
to turn her into a cute, sweet princess (Zexy, January 2012, pp. 43-49).
The article continues on with its repertoire of so-called “age-reducing
beauty tips.” However, even the above truncated list translated sheds
clear light on an insidiously oppressive process that prepares not only
for the bride’s normative performance of a lavish wedding, but also for
the groom’s consumption of the sexualized body of his would-be wife.
The derogatory connotations of nennü and shunü are masked by the wedding
industry as beauty standards that entice women consumers to
splurge on cosmetic commodities while simultaneously disciplining their
bodies so as to conform to the normative femininity constructed by the
confluence of local and global hegemony.

Engstrom (2008) eloquently criticizes The Knot, the dominant U.S.
bridal media, for their spread of hegemonic messages. Engstrom (2008)
exposes the gender oppression underlying the Western bride’s passive
position as a “physical object” (p. 68) and the raison d’être of displaying
her physical beauty and femininity in a one-day-only spectacle.
Borrowing from Engstrom’s (2008) critique, this author further posits,
based upon an analysis of the Chinese bridal publications, that the hegemonic
control over the bride’s body is becoming a transnational
stigma. In the Chinese case, such hegemonic forces foray into marketing
strategies that promote the supposedly modern lifestyle and new cultural
experience, which in turn conceal the patriarchal domination at the local
consumer marketplace. The selling of every piece of luxurious bridal accoutrement,
though seemingly introducing a new consumer experience,
points to a “male gaze” in Mulvey’s (1989) term. For instance, the
Chinese bride is encouraged to try on the Yumi Katsura Paris wedding
gown, which is said to signify the pinnacle of the Haute Couture world
fashion hierarchy. As the Zexy magazine introduces, Yumi Katsura, the
renowned Japanese fashion designer, is specialized in integrating the
world popular “3S” style (i.e. “Simple,” “Sexy,” and Slender”) into the
elements of Japanese kimono costumes, thus creating her own unique
and ideal combination of “Western romance” with “Eastern elegance”
(Modern Brides, March 2012, p. 75). Thus, the curvaceous and slender
body of the Chinese bride in a Yumi Katrura Paris gown, apparently
appeals much more to her own gaze and vanity. In these bridal media
texts, this author also finds that the selling of expensive bridal accoutrements
and cosmetics is being extended to the advertising of what the
magazines call “micro-cosmetic surgery procedures” (Zexy, January 2012,
p. 25). In the same issue of Zexy that advocates the “nen” bride, another
article claims to provide the “best secret formula” for an instant
transformation of a bride’s facial contour and skin quality. This
“formula” actually contains expensive and risky cosmetic procedures of
injecting doses of Hyaluronic acid, collagen, and even BOTOX into
women’s bodies so as to “increase the elasticity of the skin texture, slow
down the aging process, and improve the facial flaw” (Zexy, January
2012, p. 25). While the magazine comforts the bride who is worried
about her “not so perfect face” via offering tips of new technological
beautification, it bespeaks the wedding industry’s problematic contribution
to the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery consumption
by mainland Chinese women (Luo, 2012b). This particular magazine article,
albeit in a condensed fashion, sheds light on the subtle yet powerful
ways in which the marketing advocacy of bridal commodities creates
both beauty regimens and oppressive social and gender scripts that prey
on the body of the Chinese bride.

The Wedding and Marriage “Expert” and Self-Subjugation Tips

Whereas beauty regimens permeate the media texts of China’s wedding
industry, reinforcing the normative femininity of the Chinese bride,
another set of rules surface in this analysis that impose patriarchal power
over the bride’s gender roles. More specifically, it is found that the
bridal publications go beyond advertising bridal commodities and assume
the questionable role of the wedding and marriage “expert.” Such
media texts provide extensive suggestions on how to be not only the
“perfect bride” but also the “ideal wife.” Goinlove.com, a well-acclaimed
wedding consultation Web site, dominates the cyberspace of China’s
wedding market. Anchored to four focal themes “Wedding,” “Bride,”
“Lady,” and “Fashion,” this Web site constitutes a reservoir of “how
to behave” tips for brides-to-be, ranging from “how to select a wedding
planner,” “how to shop in a wedding expo,” “how to be a fashionable
bride,” “how to be a satisfactory daughter-in-law,” to “how to be an
ideal wife” (Goinlove.com, 2012). Among a profusion of tips on how to
manage a marriage life, a prominent editorial titled “How to Deal with
Your Married Man” stands out. It lists ten pieces of advice that a newly
married woman is expected to attend to when she faces a new husband
and finds (as the article predicts) that the “hidden sides” of him surface
after they have passed their romantic dating stage. Here are some highlights7
from this piece.

Tip #1: The more you love him, the more devoted he is to
you. Therefore, be prepared for being a wife as your
lifelong profession.

Tip #2: Be tolerant of your man’s flaws and errors and welcome
him back with open arms in both his times of success
and failure.

Tip #3: Be clean and hygienic. Although your man can be lazy
and dirty himself, he cannot tolerate a messy home
and a careless wife.

Tip #4: Let your man have the title of your household’s master
and thus maintain his face and dignity.

Noticeably, such advice addresses the new wife as “you,” a textual
strategy identified by Althusser (1971) as “interpellation,” which “occurs
when a text hails or summons an individual as a concrete subject within
an ideological framework” (cited in Gribble, 1997, p. 23). In other
words, when the woman reader is interpellated by these particular messages,
she recognizes that she is being hailed and unconsciously internalizes
the oppressive gender ideologies these texts convey. Proliferated
through Internet media, these messages become even more pervasive and
discursive, as this author notes that the Web designs allow for easy transmissions
of every piece of online text to personal emails and blogs, accessible
to numerous readers. Very blatantly, this exemplary list of “tips” exerts
the hegemonic power of regulating husband-wife relationships. The
bride, the would-be wife, is instilled with the patriarchal norms of being
self-subjugated to the subordinate position in her matrimony. On the
whole, these “how to behave” indoctrinations reveal an image of the
subordinate Chinese bride, which adds so much dissonance to the glamorous,
picture-perfect bride in a lavish wedding, so imbued with consumerist
agency and postfeminist sensibilities. The findings here concur
with Adrian’s (2003) query about the “once-in-a lifetime” cultural logic
underlying a spectacle of a wedding performance. As Adrian (2003) explains,
beneath the bride’s once-in-a-lifetime glory on her wedding day
lies the precarious reasoning that a decline in the woman’s outlook and
lifestyle ensues and that she has to sacrifice herself in marriage and devote
herself to familial responsibilities after the rite of her wedding
passage. In this regard, the self-subjugation tips herald a reverse of power
relations soon after the bride’s momentary dominance on her wedding
day. Notwithstanding her materialistic indulgence in her “big fat
wedding,” the modern Chinese bride neither escapes from the gender
scripts of Chinese society nor celebrates a significant enhancement of
her status in her matrimony.

Concluding Remarks

The bridal publications constitute a fascinating cultural terrain, in
which the diversification of Chinese women’s cultural experience goes
hand in hand with the rigid re-inscription of their gender roles. As this
analysis shows, the magazine texts present a microcosmic picture of
China’s wedding media conglomerations, which exert hegemonic control
over women consumers via tapping into such globalizing forces as neoliberal values of agency and postfeminist mentality. Importantly, this article
unravels the intricate ways the media texts construct the imagery
of the modern Chinese bride, who appears as if she enjoys the best offered
by the confluence of local and global consumerist prosperities.
The extravagant wedding rituals, the exorbitant bricolage of romance,
and the pricey beautification commodities and technologies are repackaged
for the achievement of the ideal of consumer one-upmanship.
But the lavish wedding packages represent the synecdoche of an ongoing
process, in which the globalizing forces join hands with the local
systems in regimenting local women’s bodies, and recreating patriarchal
social and gender scripts that are detrimental to women’s efforts to achieve
equality in marriage and love.

Through analyzing the media images of the modern Chinese bride,
this study opens up further research on the social realities of matrimony
and love in China’s globalizing consumer culture. Within the scope of
textual analysis, this article has not yet explored beyond the representational
terrain. Being an insider of Chinese culture, the author is well
aware of what has been left out of bridal publications’ depictions of the
glamorous bride. As Chen (2003) implies in his journalistic report titled
“A Match Made in Heaven, If You Have Enough Yuan,” China’s development
of market economy witnesses the ever-increasing gap between
the haves and the have-nots. One social phenomenon that signifies such
a gap is that migrant laborers from the rural areas attempt to seek economic
advancement in cosmopolitan cities only to find low income
positions. Among the influx of rural labor forces are the lower-class, rural
young women who search for love and marriage in cities in hope
of “marrying up,” so to speak, but end up being taken advantage of
or even abused by comfortably well-off urban men, according to a news
report in Women of China (2007), the official publication by All China
Women’s Federation. The scene of women migrants struggling outside
the door to marriage strikes a discord into lavish wedding showcases in
China’s mediascape. Another social phenomenon that also raises concerns
about Chinese women’s status in their matrimony is referred as
“Bao Ernai” (China Daily, 2000), which literally means “raising mistresses”
on the part of unfaithful husbands who become wealthy and
desire extramarital affairs to signify the emergence of what Zheng
(2012) calls “entrepreneurial masculinity” in China’s postsocialist marketplace (p. 45). Furthermore, women’s disempowerment in their love and
marriage lives surfaces in the widespread reality TV dating shows such
as Fei Cheng Wu Rao (If You Are the One), and Wo Men Yue Hui Ba (Lets
Date). These shows depict the upper-middle class, postfeminist women
eagerly jumping onto the marry-yourself-off bandwagon while those being
left-behind are called “shengnü” (“leftover women”), a label imbued
with gender inequality. In sum, the juxtaposition of the modern Chinese
bride, in her packaged glamour, and her less-fortunate counterparts falling
out of the grand wedding performance, calls for further interrogation
of the intertwining social and gender oppression concealed beneath
the veneer of consumerist prosperities.

Whereas this paper magnifies the role of the local industry as the dexterous
bricoleur, especially in its textual construction of the modern
bride, it has not yet examined women consumers’ subjectivities in being
or becoming bricoleurs who create their own signified meanings through
the consumption of wedding products, services, and media. As globalization
scholars point out, while local consumers desire global products
and emulate global consumption behaviors, they neither abandon their
own culture, tradition, or heritage, nor do they become passive receivers
of global ideas (Chua & Iwabuchi, 2008; Featherstone & Lash, 1995;
Roberston, 1995). Rather, such consumers exert “the power to adapt,
innovate, and maneuver within a glocalized world” (Ritzer, 2004, p. 77).
In this regard, this analysis points to future discussions on the reception
end of the wedding industry through looking into Chinese brides’
unique, personal perspectives.

Glossary

1 In this paper, I use the term “the modern Chinese bride” in contrast to the “Taiwanese
bride” and “Western bride” in the existing literature. However, as my elaborations later on
suggest, Chinese women are by no means homogeneous or free from class, gender, and
ethnic categorizations. I agree with Hershatter’s (2007) advice that nuances among Chinese
women need to be recognized in Chinese cultural studies. In my analysis, “the modern
Chinese bride” tokens the haves and the privileged, who can afford all the luxury of an
exorbitant wedding package.

2 The Web sites of these bridal publications are: Zexy (Da Zhong Jie Xi): http://www.zexy.com.cn; Modern Brides (Xin Niang): http://www.brides.com.cn; Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang):
http://www.todaybrides.com; Goinlove.com (Shi Shang Hun Qing Wang): http://www.goinlove.com. These bridal publications are written in Chinese but include the English translations
of their names. Literally, Xin Niang magazine should be translated as Brides instead of
Modern Brides. Such a mistranslation might be deliberate to better reflect the contents of
the magazine.

3 In his book Mythologies, one of Barthes’ examples is the cover of the French magazine Paris
Match. The picture of the magazine cover shows “a young Negro in a French uniform saluting
with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on the fold of the tricolour” (Barthes, 1972, p.116,
cited in Hall, 1997, p.39). According to Hall (1997), this example explicitly demonstrates
the ways representation plays out not only at the denotative level, but also at the connotative
level, which has a broader cultural and ideological meaning. As Hall further explains,
the denotative, literal message of the cover image is “a black soldier is giving the
French flag a salute” (p. 39). By contrast, the connotative, cultural message, based upon
Barthes’ own interpretation, may be “that France is a great Empire, and that all her sons,
without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better
answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism that the zeal shown by this Negro in
serving his so-called oppressors” (Barthes, 1972, p.116, cited in Hall, 1997, p.39).

4 I learn about the gender of the magazines’ major employees by both looking at their names
provided at the editorial pages of each monthly issue and searching their blogs (if any) via
using the search engine Baidu.com. Tang Qiong works for Today Bride as the editorial
director. Erica Yu serves as the leader of Modern Bride’s editorship, under which, Lynn Wang
and Amy Li work as fashion director, Amanda Chen as copyright editor, and Yuki Yu as
art director. Interestingly, these Chinese women use their English given names, which presumably
enhance the “modern” look of the publications. The main editor of Zexy is Luo
Weiguo, a male writer from Shanghai, known for his prolific publications (Retrieve
November 15, 2012 from http://baike.baidu.com/view/2465531.htm)

5 The bridal magazines use RMB money units to indicate the prices of the wedding packages.
For the convenience of international readers, I convert the RMB money value into US dollars,
using the average currency conversion rate in 2012, i.e., 1USD = 6.23RMB

6 The examples of the Shanghai coffee shop, Vietnamese fresh marketplace, and Barcelonan
Catholic church are from the bridal photos in Today Brides, April 2012 (p. 88, p. 68, and
p. 63).

7 I am not translating the lengthy tips word by word. Rather, I am translating the major ideas
as accurately as possible.

J Barrett,, (1973), Women hold up half the sky. In M. B. Young (Ed.), Women
in China: Studies in social change and feminism, Center
for Chinese Studies, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, p193-200.

B. A Stillion‐Southard,, (2008), Beyond the backlash: Sex and the City and three
feminist struggles, Communication Quarterly, 56, p149-167,
[https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370802026943]
.

45.

M. D Vavrus,, (1998), Working the Senate from the outside in: The mediated construction
of a feminist political campaign, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 15(3), p213-235,
[https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039809367046]
.

T. T Zheng,, (2012), From courtesans to modern hostesses: Music and construction
of gender in the entertainment industry in China, The International
Journal of the Humanities, 9(7), p39-53.

54.

X Zhou,, (2004), Meinü jingji, Zhongguo Funü, 616, p25.

55.

W. H Zhou,, (1999), Shanghai baby, Erya, Taipei.

Biographical Note: Wei Luo is an Assistant Professor of Communication
at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne. Luo’s current
research explores evolving gender ideologies within China’s neoliberal
discourse of consumerism. She is interested in employing interpretive,
critical, and rhetorical approaches to examine the intersections of issues
on gender, ethnicity, and class within the confluence of global and local
cultures. Luo’s most recent publications include a book chapter and a
journal article in Women’s Studies in Communication.
E‐mail: luow@ipfw.edu

Appendix

Appendix

The basic information of the bridal magazines (print issues) used for
my analysis:

Magazine

Publisher

Editorial Director/Leader

Target Readership

Approximate Monthly Circulation(Per Issue)

Unit Price (Per Issue)

Zexy (Da Zhong Jie Xi)

Shanghai Century Publishing Corporation Ltd.‐‐Far East Publishing House

Mr. Luo Weiguo

upper‐middle class newly weds or couples about to tie the knot (would‐be brides at home and abroad in particular)

16,000 copies circulated in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou; the number of circulation in other cities unknown

10 RMB (1.6 USD)

Modern Brides (Xin Niang)

China Council for the Promotion of International Trade

Ms. Erica Yu

upper‐middle class newly weds or couples about to tie the knot (would‐be brides at home and abroad in particular)

480,000 copies at national circulation

25 RMB (4 USD)

Today Brides (Jin Ri Xin Niang)

Newspaper & Magazine Development Center of Sichuan Province

Ms. Tang Qiong

upper‐middle class newly weds or couples about to tie the knot (would‐be brides hailing from various regions of mainland China)

2) While the circulation of these magazines’ print editions does not appear large, their electronic
editions should draw a much greater number of readers who have Internet access,
without having to pay subscription fees.

Copyright โ 2019 by the Research Institute of Asian Women, Sookmyung Women's University.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Research Institute of Asian Women (RIAW) ) Sookmyung Professional Center #412, 36, Cheongpa-ro 47na-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04309 Republic of Korea Tel: +82-2-710-9177